Stiffener rings are typically used for stiffness during ground transportation and usually serve no function during flight. I've seen stiffener rings separate on other launches with no effect on second stage performance.

Still, your speculation is reasonable. It's possible that the oscillation was initially well within controllable parameters but continued to slowly grow until it got out of controllable limits.

Hopefully this is a relatively easy fix. I want to see two more flights this year.

- Alistair

From what I've read, spacex has said that what I saw falling away was a ring only used to supply stiffness during 1st stage flight and it was supposed to fall away, so I doubt my theory is correct.

We managed to talk to SpaceX yesterday. The info we got gives me confidence in Elon's remarks. I can't divulge what was said but as I see it SpaceX has 3 things to prove on the next launch.

1) improve stage separation. It's evident from the video that the separation mechanism didn't come off all at once, hence the kick over which brushed the nozzle (despite SpaceX's initial denials of contact). I'm not convinced that the stage separation 'incident' caused problems later; it needs to be addressed, but I think this is manageable.
2) Deal with what caused the oscillations. From what SpaceX told us yesterday, I think they have a good handle on what the cause was.

Last year, the real time video stopped before the actual end of the vehicle telemetry and image transmission. Is that the case with this launch also? I can conceive of a policy to end public transmission with the onset of serious anomalies, but this has an impact on evaluations by those of us who are planning missions to use SpaceX vehicles.

While I noticed the apparent control oscillations, I am more concerned about the abrupt end and "Telemetry Lost" message.

Few things will cause an abrupt and complete loss of telemetry other than the catastrophic destruction of the vehicle (explosion). Tumbling or rolling in vacuum is not likely to produce such an outcome, nor will â€œshutdownâ€

The online video was terminated very early. Some video samples show an additional 14 seconds, which reveal almost 360 degrees of roll combined with the continuing pitch and yaw oscillations. Space X has captured telemetry and video for virtually the entire flight, although roll and other gyrations caused attenuation and periodic drop out of these signals.

The vehicle continued to accelerate until the engine shut down about 60 seconds before plan, more than a minute after video cutoff. At that point the vehicle was at over 300 km altitude (not far below the ISS orbit, but in a very different orbital plane) and reached about 2/3 or orbital velocity. An orbital launch vehicle gains a lot of velocity in the last minute of its engine run. The engine shut down because of â€œFuel Starvationâ€